Why do I love this so much? It’s as much an erotic tendency as a neurotic one, or perhaps shades in the space where the circles overlap (or perhaps there is very little outside that overlap.) Assume as a guiding feature of the techno-professional middle classes a certain belief in perfectibility, then subdivide between a belief in the perfectibility of self-knowledge and a perfectibility of self. I have very little energy for the perfection or even the very great improvement of myself (all right, a nagging urge, but a lazy one. I do still read magazines.) I like the hundred pushups challenge but I prefer the pushups logger. (Week 3, Day 1, had to repeat it.) I tinker endlessly on Mint.com although I don’t spend any more sensibly. I just like to see my household in pie charts.

Come on, you Wendell Berrys, you hippies and one-hand clappers, come and tell me how this digital mapmaking threshes out the romance from the world. You think I’m not chasing the ineffable down to the last quantum? Everything is charted, nothing is known, but the chase is easily as good as the kill.

A friend of the blog has been known to track his consumption of various goods (eggs, vitamins of a sort, movies) in excel sheets. Game on, boy. Here’s how it’s done.